Da Nang Police conducting drug testing on a wide scale

Vietnam has a pretty hard standpoint as far as drug use is concerned. It's basically banned across the board. But at the same time regular drugs like marijuana are very widely available and sometimes there are even Telegram phone numbers that are listed in public on advertisements. They don't come straight out and say "buy weed here!" but it is pretty evident what they are selling.

To me this seems like something that would be really easy to bust on the part of the authorities but the ads keep ending up on stickers all around town. I have heard rumors that the police don't care as long as the drugs are only being sold to non-Vietnamese people. I guess this makes sense just like the casinos that we have here are not usable by Vietnamese. I guess they are kind of reserving all the vices for the visitors.

I am not a huge fan of weed but I also am of the standpoint that it is far less damaging than legal alcohol is. I don't make the rules though. You can smell weed being smoked all over the place and it is really easy to come by.

Recently though, there have been stories published about the police doing raids on entire apartment buildings and searching apartments for drugs and also pee testing the people that live in the buildings. There is some level of people talking about how this isn't really happening but it is just propaganda. This could be the case, but are you really willing to risk it? This is espcecially true for the thousands of expats that are digital nomads here: We just choose to live here even though we are employed by some company overseas.

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The story is all over the internet and made its way to Reddit as well as the usual, mostly bogus, Facebook posts. There are still a lot of people claiming that it didn't really happen but again, are you willing to risk it?

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I don't engage in drug use for the most part but I did realize after people starting talking about this that I actually did have a weed gummy bear in my freezer that was given to me something like 2 years ago. I threw it out.

I don't know exactly why this is happening now but I think it has something to do with the huge amount of expats that have moved to this city in the past 2 years. A great many of them have moved here from Thailand and while it is regrettable to say this, a lot of them are kind of an undesirable lot and many of them have been making problems with criminal misbehavior including attacking taxi drivers, smashing up bars and cafes, and even one guy that robbed a jewelry store.

This reflects badly on all of us and while I really don't want to see people who smoke a bit of weed get thrown in jail or deported, there actually could be a net benefit to this because honestly, the quality of expats here in town has gone downhill quite a lot in the past 2 years.

Vietnam has always been welcoming of people just wanting to stay here for as long as they want, but lately there have been more and more cases of people acting really disrespectful and downright dangerous.

Now this could be very bad news for people that are going to take this information and now change their ways because while I don't know the specifics of it, a lot of drugs stay in your system for a long while after you actually used it. I had a puff on a joint at a party around 6 weeks ago so I am probably ok. But if it turns up in my system if and when I get checked, I would be lumped into the same category as someone that had ripped some bong hits moments before the police turned up.

So tensions are running a bit high among the expat community at the moment. Some regular users are contemplating going to sit in another country for a couple months while the drug exits their system.

I don't like the government being all up in people's personal lives but they really gave us a lot of freedom over here and many people totally took advantage of this. Some might say that this sounds like a privacy invasion and a violation of rights but let me tell you about how the police operates in a communist country like Vietnam: They do whatever they want.

So if you are planning on moving to Vietnam or if you already live here, it might not be a terrible idea to abandon your illegal habits. Unfortunately the biggest problem maker of all drugs is alcohol and the police don't seem to have a problem with that.